SIMON BARON-COHEN

Simon Baron-Cohen, PhD, MPhil is a professor of
developmental psychopathology in the departments of psychiatry and
experimental psychology, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge,
and director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of
Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. He is best known for his work
on autism, including
his early theory that autism involves degrees of 'mindblindness'
(or delays in the development of theory
of mind), and his later theory that autism is an extreme form
of the 'male brain', which involved a major reconceptualization
of typical psychological sex differences in terms of empathy and
systemizing.

Education

Baron-Cohen earned degrees in Human Sciences from
New College, Oxford, a PhD in Psychology from University College
London, and an Master of Philosophy in Clinical Psychology at the
Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London.

Research areas

Baron-Cohen's first research paper on autism was
published in 1985, with Uta Frith and Alan Leslie.[1] It proposed
that children with autism show social and communication difficulties
as a result of a delay in the development of a theory of mind. Tested
using the false belief experiment, this result has been replicated
innumerable times.

In his 1995 book Mindblindness (MIT Press), he
suggested that an individual's theory
of mind depends on a set of brain mechanisms that develop in
early childhood, including the eye direction detector (EDD), the
shared attention mechanism (SAM), and the intentionality detector
(ID). Baron-Cohen singled out SAM as a key precursor to theory of
mind, giving rise to the first early screening test for autism,
the CHAT (Checklist for Autism in Toddlers).[2] This quick test
is used at 18 months old to check if the child is showing behaviours
such as pointing and gaze following as examples of shared (or joint)
attention. Absence or delays in joint attention is one marker of
risk for a later diagnosis of autism. The CHAT remains the only
screening instrument for autism in infancy that has been tested
at a population level, and a revised version of the instrument is
under evaluation to detect Asperger Syndrome also.

In 1994, with his colleague Howard Ring, he published
the first evidence that theory of mind relied on the orbito-frontal
cortex, and in 1999 they published further evidence that theory
of mind was also strongly dependent on the amygdala, a key region
in the brain involved in decoding and responding to others' actions
and mental states. These studies also demonstrated that in autism
there is under-activity in these regions, while the person is thinking
about other minds.

His later theory, outlined in his 2003 book "The
Essential Difference" (Penguin/Basic Books), was the first
serious attempt to link the fields of typical sex differences in
psychology with the field of autism. He proposed that on average,
females develop faster in empathy and on average males develop faster
in systemizing. People with autism, he argued, show an extreme of
the typical male profile in having a disability in empathy alongside
intact or even superior systemizing. Much of the empirical work
testing this theory was in collaboration with his colleague Sally
Wheelwright (See also EQ SQ Theory.)

In a major program of research, summarized in
his 2005 book "Prenatal Testosterone in Mind" (MIT Press),
with his doctoral students Svetlana Lutchmaya, Rebecca Knickmeyer,
Bonnie Auyeung, and Emma Chapman, he demonstrated that foetal testosterone
(FT) levels (measured in the amniotic fluid) inversely predict social
behaviour (e.g., eye contact at 12 months old), language development
(e.g., vocabulary size at 24 months old), quality of social relationships
at 4 years old, and empathy at 8 years old. FT levels also positively
predict systemizing at 8 years old. A single biological mechanism
(FT) thus appears to influence both empathy and systemizing, in
opposite ways. He is currently testing if autism is associated with
elevated FT. This link remains to be fully tested. (See also Sexual
differentiation.)

His prenatal androgen (FT) theory of autism is
not at odds with a genetic theory, and Baron-Cohen has argued that
whilst people on the autism spectrum are strong "systemizers"
(showing a strong attraction to systems, and a drive to identify
lawful or regular patterns within a system, as a way of understanding
and predicting systems), so are their parents. His most recent idea
is that autism may be the result of assortative mating of two strong
systemizing parents. Evidence for this includes the finding that
both mothers and fathers of children on the autism spectrum have
excellent attention to and memory for detail (as measured on the
Embedded Figures Test), and that the grandfathers of children with
autism, on both sides of the family, are more likely to have worked
in the field of engineering (which demands good systemizing skills)

As a psychologist, Baron-Cohen's work has had
far reaching influences in the fields of developmental psychology,
cognitive neuroscience, primatology, philosophy of mind, as well
as clinical psychology and psychiatry. In addition to basic research
into the biomedical causes of autism, Baron-Cohen and his colleagues
have produced practical tools for people with autism, including
Mind Reading: An Interactive Guide to Human Emotions,[3] which is
educational software for helping to improve emotion-recognition
skills. More recently, his original ideas led to creation of The
Transporters,[4] a children's animation series which superimposed
real human faces showing emotions onto animated vehicles, as a way
of harnessing the strong interest in systems (vehicles being an
example of a system) that even preschoolers with autism show, to
help make faces and emotional expressions more autism-friendly and
predictable. The Transporters DVD, commissioned by Culture Online,
part of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, was created
by Catalyst Pictures, working alongside Culture Online, Baron-Cohen
and researchers from Cambridge's Autism Research Centre[5].

Simon was also consulted in the case of Daniel
Tammet in the documentary "The boy with the incredible brain".
[6]

Selected Publications

Books

Simon Baron-Cohen has written five books, including
Mindblindness (1995) and The Essential Difference: Male and Female
Brains and the Truth About Autism (2003). He has edited three books,
including Understanding Other Minds (1993), with a second edition
in 2001. In addition to autism, Baron-Cohen is also one of the pioneers
in the empirical study of synaesthesia, and has edited a book on
it: Synaesthesia: Classic and contemporary readings (1997).

Family

Simon Baron-Cohen is a first cousin of Sacha Baron
Cohen[7], the actor and comedian famous for his characters Borat
and Ali G. His maternal grandfather's brother was Robert Greenblatt,
professor of endocrinology at the Medical College of Georgia, whose
research led to the development of the oral contraceptive pill.
[8]

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